A talk on “John Michell’s Enchanted Landscape”, 29th May 2019 in London.

It’s good to see there’s still interest in him. Many in the British Isles will remember him as one of the key writers of the 1970s and early 1980s on the alleged ‘prehistoric geometry’ of the English landscape, on general astro-archaeology, and as an assiduous ley-line hunter. An authentic ‘fringe traditionalist’, of the sort that England increasingly had no patience with from about 1985 onwards, as the authentic place-rooted ‘eccentric’ type who had previously thrived was slowly but firmly purged from modern life.

He was the inheritor of an earlier 1920 tradition around ley-lines and Alfred Watkins, which I suspect the Anglophile Lovecraft partly knew about and drew on for some small elements of stories such as “The Lurking Fear”. See my annotated “Lurking Fear” for details, page 38 and footnote.